The Liberal, Volume I, Number 41, 1 Pepeluali 1893 — THE SEDITION LAWS. [ARTICLE]

THE SEDITION LAWS.

It must be a keep regret to every friend of the government that it thought it necessary to promulgate the Sedition Act published on the 31st. It is always and of necessity a misfortune when a civil government finds such expedients necessary to its safety. Liberty of speech, and of the press, guaranteed by a special provision of the constitution, should not be intrenched upon except in cases and under circumstances of he direct necessity. But, after all, the government of the day is the proper and only body, constituted as we now are, to determine the necessity for such measures. Of course the Courts may have their innings later, but, for the present, the Sedition Act has the term of law, and should be respected as such.We do not propose to discuss the necessity or lack of necessity for this repressive measure further than to state that, if any necessity exists, the facts constituting the same have not been brought to our attention. But the fact of the passage of the Act is proof positive that the new government thought it essential in the

harmony of the situation, and "Brutus is an honorable man. So are they all, all honorable men." _________ When in 1798, the tide of political acrimony ran high in the United States, Congress though fit to pass the celebrated Alien and Sedition Acts to which we are still sometimes referred as precedents. Those Acts had a stormy and malodorous existence and were repealed a few years later. The Sedition Act was susstantially the same as our Provisional Government has now promulgated. All the American statesmen of the day were ranged, almost ly, either in support of, or in opposition to those laws, and especially the Sedition Act. As to Hamilton's attitude thereon it is written, "In the first draft of the Sedition Act he saw danger of civil war, and said: "Let us not established a tyrrany. Energy is a very different thing from violence." This was the language of a statesman," * * * There has been a general effort on the part of biographers to clear their respective heroes from all responsibility for those illfated measures." Lodge's Alexander Hamilton, p. 224. The great Chief Justice Marshall. before his elevation to the Bench also had decided opinions as to the demerits of the Sedition Act, for we read: -"No measure of policy during the Adams administration, of which Marshall was a strong supporter, was more warmlyassociated by party feeling, and more vigorously defended by the party of the President's friends, than the Alien and the Sedition Laws, passed at a previous session of Congress, when Mr. Marshall was not a member. It was now purposed to the second section of the latter act, which formed the sedition feature of the law. Mr. Marshall honestly disapproved of it, and voted for its repeal. * * * It has long since been generally conceded that these acts were gross blunders, the offspring of excited partisan feeling. Marshall's cool judicial sense made him fully cognizant of their ionable character, and he could port them." Magruder's Life of John Marshall pp. 148-9. ------- And Chief Justice Cooley, of later though sacredly less renoun than Marshall, has this to say of the Sedition Act: - "The Sedition Law was passed during the administration of the elder Adams, when the fabric of government was still new and untried, and when many men seemed to think that the breath of heated party discussions might tumble it about their heads. Its constitutionality was always disputed by a large party, and its impolicy was beyond question. It had a direct tendency to produce the very state of things its sought to repress; the prosecutions under it were instrumental, among other things, in the final overthrow and destruction of the party by which it was adopted, and it is impossible to conceive, at the present time, of any such state of things as would he likely to bring its re-enactment, or the passage of any similar repressive measure." Cooley's Constitutional Limitations, pp. 427-8. THE LIBERAL sincerely hopes that the post mortem biographies of those concerned in the promulgation of our Hawaiian Sedition Act may not be written for many years to come, and that when they are written, that Act will have been so long a thing of the past as to have faded from men's memories. For the more immediate future we hope that the Provisional Government will see its way to a repeal of the Act in question at a very early date.